SOMEONE sent me a photo over the weekend. It looked to me like it was a slice of beef with six small roast potatoes served in a cardboard tray.

Now I’m not one for all that fiddly nouveau cuisine nonsense but I do like things to look appetising– which this did not.

All the more surprising when the photo came to me from the relative of a patient in my hospital.

I have to say I was shocked. Now first off, I have form here. In my very early days, I was a food porter at Dudley Road Hospital, when the whole nation rightly made jokes about hospital food.

I well remember having to push the food trolleys, which were massive by the way, across the entire hospital.

Fellow porters could do two at a time but my puny self could only manage one. And what was inside them was, to be fair, not of a high standard.

This struck me as odd even then. I mean who would be inspired by some gloopy gunk on a plate?

And surely people who are ill and needing to recover need to be given something that looks appetizing to encourage them to eat – especially if they are not feeling like it.

But that was nearly 40 years ago and I did think things had changed. But to see this fresh photo of hospital food shocked me.

I know everyone’s on a budget and I don’t expect Gordon Ramsay quality– but I have to say that when I saw it, I felt like letting off a few Ramsay-like expletives.

Now I’m sure there are good reasons for the cardboard ‘tray’ and the lack of vegetables (in fact I believe the patient did not request them because “they are always cooked to a mush”), but when we start treating food as just a functional thing, we risk people not eating it. And that is bad for patients.

I do hope that staff are monitoring the weight of patients to check that they aren’t wasting away.

I suppose the thing that shocked me most was that I had no idea about this. We have protective mealtimes in the hospital, so why would I know.

But it left me wondering what else I don’t know about the patient experience.

The only way patients’ lives are improved is for patient voices to be heard. So let’s start speaking up for good or for ill.